monochrom event // Roböxotica 2004 / Vienna (19 November - 27 November): Roböxotica is the first and, inevitably, leading festival concerned with cocktail robotics world-wide. Until recently, no attempts were made to publically discuss the role of cocktail robotics as an index for the integration of technological innovations into the human Lebensraum, or to document the increasing occurrence of radical hedonism in man-machine communication. Roboexotica is an attempt to fill this vacuum. A micro mechanical change of paradigm in the age of borderless capital. Mr. Turing would without a doubt test this out.
Scientists, researchers, computer geeks and artists from all over the world participate to build cocktail robots and discuss about technological innovation, futurology and science fiction.
You tried to build a Cocktail Robot? You failed? Perfect! The theme of this year’s Roböxotica symposion is ‘Beautiful failure’.
In the study of technological development, focusing attention on the failure, the error, the breakdown, the malfunction means: opening the black box of technology. Science and Technology Studies (especially Langdon Winner and Bruno Latour) have convincingly demonstrated that the widespread inability to understand technological artifacts as fabricated entities, as social and cultural phenomena, derives from the fact that in retrospect only those technologies that prove functional for a culture and can be integrated into everyday life are “left over.” However, the perception of what is functional, successful and useful is itself the product of social and cultural, and last but not least political and economic processes. Selection processes and abandoned products (developmental derailments, sobering intermediary results, useless prototypes) are not discussed.
The aim of the symposium is to illuminate the richness of technological development processes without denunciatory intention, to show which cultural patterns are at their basis. Thus, in addition to technological development, the motif of “failure as opportunity” will be investigated in a cultural context.
The approach is transdisciplinary (i.e. not only scientific approaches are at issue, but also those from the practice of technological development and from art). In getting away from the paradigm of automatic progress through technology, it seems especially important to promote a discursive culture that brings together the various logics and forms of discourse found in the technical sciences and in technological development, in cultural studies and philosophy, in forms of use and in artistic approaches.
Link 1
Link 2
posted by johannes,
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
[The Archives]
.
.
.
.
.
|
.
.
.
|
